Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

I wasn’t entirely sure what was going to happen for our field trip. It just seemed to be a rather exciting prospect, hopefully something new and different. After all, the last field trip I had gone for was during JC which was 3 years ago. What did happen though, was an extremely eye opening experience, which exposed me to something I never thought would exist in Singapore.  During the brief that Prof Mohan gave on the bus ride there, I imagined that Willing Hearts had a building of its own and would be rather prominent, because after all, it was a soup kitchen of sorts and they would definitely need all that space and facilities to house their operations right? I was rather surprised when we turned into an ulu industrial building which looked rather old and empty, except for the few people at the loading bay and the packets and packets of food, which at that moment seemed to have appeared out of nowhere as the building looked rather dead.  Imagine the surprise I felt when ...

We weren't told on the itinerary of the field trip beforehand. Prof Mohan gave us more detail on it en route to Willing Hearts. Upon hearing a more in-depth summary of the day's activities, quite honestly my initial thoughts were this "I didn't take time off work to do some community service. Since when did I volunteer my services? Just what can I learn from this field trip? Seriously?" My skepticism was of course proven wrong, but I will touch more on that later. Upon reaching the site, we first helped in loading many food packets into the delivery van. There was an NUS alumni there to facilitate the planning and logistics. We somehow managed to cram all the food packets into the van. After that, we were brought up to Willing Heart's Soup Kitchen. I was quite stunned that they were actually quite organised there. The space was allocated accordingly to facilitate the kitchen operations. Right at the entrance, there was a packing station whereby volunteer...

Before I start on my reflection, I believe its nice to give a disclaimer since my views have mostly been "unconventional" in nature, due to my childhood. Firstly, we were brought to CIDECO Industrial complex. #04-06 where Willing Hearts food pantry is situated at. I'm not going to mention about any form of "heart-warming scenes" for I felt none. To me, its seems like another nightmare of under-resourced / under-manpower-ed organisation trying to do its best (such as MINDS). Volunteers seen that day were plentiful indeed. However the key personnel that drives the operations are mostly middle-aged volunteers. (Like the one we managed to interviewed) The rest could be come-and-go volunteers with vested interest. Students MAY be CIP hours, where adults MAY be to make them feel better by giving back to society. Its an issue of personal resource allocation ( will touch on it in the conclusion ) Any operations have to be funded. To me, one large concern was the ren...

The day at Willing Hearts started with a trip first down to the kitchens where we had a behind-the-scenes look at the preparation of food. It was a spectacular sight as we get to observe exactly how huge the operations are just so that beneficiaries will not go starving. The number of volunteers that are present is huge and it was heart-warming to know that students were also there to help out in the cause. As we talked to a few of the volunteers at Willing Hearts, we got to know more about the beneficiaries and the amount of help that they receive from others to continue their operations. With the new understanding in how the day-to-day operations are like, we helped to load up the packed food and headed out to help distribute the food. At each and every stop that we went to, it was hard to identify the people that required the food had it not been pointed out to us. These elderly were just every single one of us. There was nothing on them that identified them as those ...

It started with a visit to the kitchens, where the food is prepared, was done after the loading of the packed food. Volunteers aplenty, scent of freshly cooked food in the air. Mainly from school nearby, but a surprising number of CJC students. Walking into the kitchen, there is separation of the raw food preparation section and the cooking section, which was to be expected. The cooking section begins with the rice station followed by the cooking area for the rest of the dishes; vegetables, meat and fish. The packing station is the first thing seen when entering the food preparation area. Boarding the van after loading of the food and the visit to the kitchens, we headed to the first destination of food drop-off, Sims Drive, followed by 2 other drop-offs at Aljunied Crescent and Geylang Bahru. At the final stop a drop off 15 packets of food was made, getting down we started to distribute the food packets. Many of those that were receiving the food were elderly and the disabled; many...

So I am not an Indian if I am critical of Modi and his version  of Hindutva as a form of governance. I am told I have too long been a subject to the propaganda machinery of the West. It must be all the years of US brainwashing and all the US media I have consumed. My familiarity with India, my Indian roots, and my connections with these roots I so deeply cherish easily become subjects of questioning when I express my anxieties about the discursive space in India that is in creasingly becoming constrained by the Hindutva camp.  The West is framed as being in opposition to the imaginations of a bold India that is set to launch on a bold trajectory of Modi growth, led by the bold leadership of Mr. Narendra Modi. There is limited or no room for critique.  Critique is seen as being reflective of a desire for the West (I am assuming as opposed to some Hinduized fetish of India). This framing of theWest versus India, although pretty powerful in its appeal to the d...

My passport is an US passport. And I am an Indian. When in a taxi or in a gathering, I proudly share my identity as an Indian when asked about my roots. The part of my roots I am quietly proud of is the openness, syncretism, and vastness with which India accepts many worldviews, fosters spaces of differences, and thrives in the contradictions that are nurtured by these differences. These very contradictions of life, of worldviews, of ways of being come together to form the foundations of a space that is in every being committed to the ideals of diversity. This diversity of many ways of being that harmoniously live together is the spirit of secularism that is reflective of the India I love, remember, and cherish. I remember when in the US in the 1990s for my graduate education, and faced with the prospect of being proselytized by evangelicals, the ways in which my conversations would confuse the evangelicals. When I would tell them I believed every bit in the story of Jesus Chr...

I am struck by the observation shared by one of our CARE team members while doing fieldwork. He shares his observation of a popular activist blogger talking to a migrant worker. The blogger, let's call him Ben, talks condescendingly to the worker, hurriedly collecting his story, recording it, and making notes to put up the story on his blog. The worker story fits nicely into the critique that he wants to offer of the violations of worker rights. He hardly spends ten minutes in jotting down the story before moving on to the next injured worker with the next story. Ben's attitude toward the migrant worker is a top-down attitude, one that reflects his colonial mentality. He has already predetermined what he wants to find. He has a conceptual map that he wants to lay on the life of the worker. He therefore picks and choses specific stories that fit within this predetermined framework. The worker becomes the story.  His body becomes the narrative account that fits into the ...